THE DESERTS 29 



come, one may not know ; but, one hour later, they return 

 westward a journey, maybe, of hundreds of miles with 

 the reward of a three-seconds' sip of water ! 



To return for a moment to the varying characters of the 

 Desert itself. There are, besides those above described, 

 two types which should hardly be passed unmentioned. 

 There is the uncompromising type of hard brown sand- 

 incipient sandstone innocent of vegetation and flat as 

 a floor, the sort that rejects all Nature's kindly offices 

 to alleviate its ugliness or soften a barren asperity : over 

 such, a motor-car could be driven at top speed from 

 horizon to horizon, all unrelieved by a single object, 

 animate or inanimate, or even by pleasing play of colour. 

 Such an atrocity of creation surely represents Afric's last 

 word in the consummation of desolation. The Arabs 

 have a proverb that "Allah laughed when He made the 

 Sudan." 



Then there occur stretches where, league beyond 

 league, the thirsty sands are clad waist-deep in thorn- 

 scrub and stunted mimosa that wearies the sight. How 

 do they survive? Therein occurs an anomaly, since 

 plant-life (we are told) depends for its existence upon 

 moisture : here there is no moisture, whether in heaven 

 or in earth, or for 50 feet beneath the earth ; none, at 

 least that (local) human intelligence or industry has yet 

 discovered or exploited. Therein we humans seem to 

 come in a bad second to sapless mimosa, or to Nature. 

 She, science avers, runs in the desert a secret laboratory 

 wherein, by subtle chemical combination, something is 

 evolved that, though not quite water, is fluid enough to 

 make good the deficiency of that element as it relates to 

 plant-life. The mimosa can live where the human (and 

 even the camel) dies of thirst. As for the desert animals 

 of the rainless zone- addax, oryx, addra, and other 

 gazelles they neither ..drink nor need to do so (in our 

 sense of the word) from year's end to year's end. 



Upon these bush-clad deserts the mimosa-scrub may 



